LONG ISLAND CITY TO FORT GREENE, PART TWO

Continued from Part One

WHEN I left off Part One of this feature, I had made my way in Hunters Point to the Gantry Park ferry landing and rode to the Brooklyn Navy Yard via 34th Street and thus, reached three boroughs in one day. I believe my record is four as I have never touched both the Bronx and Staten Island in the same day. Perhaps NYC Ferry will allow me to do it someday. I was able to putter around in the Navy Yard briefly before a security guard in a car stopped me, and so I had a bagel at Russ & Daughters and set off south, into Clinton Hill and then Fort Greene.

GOOGLE MAP: LIC TO FORT GREENE

DeWitt Clinton held every major office in NYS including NY State Assemblyman, NYC Mayor, NYS Governor and was a US Representative and Senator from NYS. His career culminated in his indefatigable support for the Erie Canal. Streets in all five boroughs bear his name as do Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. While he had a residence in Maspeth, he made his summer home in Whitestone, which for a time was called Clintonville (and where a Clintonville Street is still found). Several schools and parks around the city are named for DeWitt Clinton, and there is even a DeWitt Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn.

I selected Clinton Avenue, one of many north-south routes in the area, and made my way south. The air was heavy and hot, but every day is like that now in NYC summers.

First thing I notice is an unusual lamppost at Clinton and Park Avenue. This type, cylindrical with a nonstandard base, is often found alongside expressways and under elevated trains. I do not know why they are deployed in this way; they’re shorter than the usual poles, but NYC also produced “regulation” octagonal-shaft poles that are short, too.

Park Avenue in Brooklyn, much less famed than its Manhattan counterpart, runs from Navy Street east to Bushwick Avenue in that neighborhood. In the 1880s…so long ago that generations have forgotten it… one of Brooklyn’s first elevated trains ran above it; it even preceded Myrtle Avenue’s for a few years. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway has shadowed it since the 1950s. As with 3rd Avenue in Sunset Park, Robert Moses decreed that buildings on its south side be demolished to made room for the expressway.

The Benjamin Banneker Academy, #77 Clinton Avenue off Park, boats a great brick frontage on Clinton Avenue with terra cotta highlights. The building occupies a former Drake’s Cake factory that runs through all the way to Waverly Avenue, one block east.

As a historical figure, the accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) are considerable, but may have been embellished over the years. We do know that Banneker, a free Black born to formerly enslaved parents in Ellicott City, MD, was an author, farmer, mathematician, inventor, clockmaker and abolitionist, a correspondent of Thomas Jefferson and a surveyor who helped design Washington DC, the US capital. He was layed by Ossie Davis in the 1979 documentary The Man Who Loved the Stars.

The residences along Clinton Avenue, one of the showcase streets, are of uniform high quality and obviously, I can’t show them all, but I’ll present the ones I especially liked. #122, between Park and Myrtle, is a simple 3-story brick building with a front porch. Combine that with a shade tree and you don’t have to turn on your air conditioner.

Because of the lush foliage this is the best photo I could manage of the Lefferts-Laidlaw House at #136 Clinton Avenue, a historic villa marked by its portico and Greek Revival Corinthian columns. The land for the house was purchased in 1840 by Rem Lefferts, a Brooklyn merchant, and his brother-in-law John Laidlaw, with much of the house built that year. It was occupied by Rem Lefferts’ brother, Leffert Lefferts Jr. and wife Amelia Ann Cozine Lefferts, daughter of Margaret Roosevelt, whose descendants include Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. The house was given a complete top to bottom restoration in the 1970s.

The Lefferts family is well represented on NYC streets maps with Brooklyn’s Lefferts Avenue and Kew Gardens’ Lefferts Boulevard. The colonial-era Lefferts Farmhouse/Homestead can be found in Prospect Park.

I’ll have to return during the cold months to record a better photo of the Lefferts House’s next door neighbor, #132 Clinton. Historic Districts Council has the details on this building, known as the Henry and Susan McDonald House, which joins the Lefferts House in NYC Landmarked status:

This unusually well-preserved and rare free-standing Italianate style frame house with Greek Revival style elements was erected for Henry and Susan McDonald in 1853-54. The house’s cubic form, low-hipped roof, strongly projected bracketed eaves, molded window surrounds, wood-and-glass double doors with segmental-arched transom and wood reveal, and columned portico enriched with dentils and paired brackets are characteristic of the Italianate style. Greek Revival style elements include the fluted porch columns with “Tower of the Winds” Corinthian capitals and first-story windows with eared surrounds.

There’s a grouping of five high rise buildings on Clinton, Willoughby and Waverly Avenues (seen here from Myrtle) known as the Clinton Hill Co-ops. They appear to have been built in the 1950s, during which the Navy Yard was still in operation, and my guess is that they were built as rentals to house workers in the nearby Navy Yard. The mosaic entrances have nautical themes.

NW corner of Clinton and Myrtle. Slanted roofs were a hallmark of buildings constructed in the 1870s and 1880s, but Isuspect these buildings aren’t quite that old. The Myrtle Avenue El rumbled past from the 1880s until 1969, still employing wooden cars that c ould only be used outdoors. I walked Myrtle Avenue’s length in 2011, and since it’s over a dozen years now, I may need to do it again.

If you’re passing by look at the corner quoins. On two you will see the names Clinton and Myrtle Avenue. That’s how streets were marked before the advent of street signs affixed to poles.

#215-221 Clinton Avenue at Willoughby. From the marvelously crudely typeset 1981 Clinton Hill Landmarks Designation Report:

Here’s a fire alarm from 1913. How do I know the year? The FDNY was still using slope-roofed alarms instead of the squarish ones with the torch (that resembles an ice cream cone). Also, the FDNY quatrigraph was used only that year. After that, the spelled-out “F.D.N.Y” was used. A few more paint jobs, though, and it won’t be detectable anymore.

The Caroline Ladd Pratt House, #229 Clinton Avenue, is possibly the most sumptuous of the many luxurious buildings that line Clinton, Washington and Vanderbilt Avenues in the Clinton Hill section.

Charles Pratt, the founder of Astral Oil, made his fortune in kerosene and founded the prestigious art school, nearby Pratt Institute. Pratt built four homes in Clinton Hill as wedding gifts to his first four sons, Charles Millard, Frederic, George and Harold. Three remain standing: 229 Clinton, Fred’s place; Charles Millard’s place next door, 241 Clinton, now the residence of the Bishop of Brooklyn; and George’s on 245 Clinton, now St. Joseph College.

When entering the house, you are shielded from the elements under a double deck 60-foot long colonnade supported by 12 columns: the bottom 6 are Ionic and the top 6 are caryatids, or heads mounted on columns. I managed to get inside on an Open House NY tour in 2004. On that same tour, I also got some choice looks at some Pratt Institute interiors.

229 Clinton was completed in 1898 by architects Babb, Cook and Willard, and occupied by Frederic and wife Caroline Ladd Pratt. Frederic was president of Pratt Institute from 1923-27, and the house’s current (2005) occupant is Pratt president Thomas Schutte and wife Tess. Students occupy the top floor of the house.

Next door, at #241 Clinton Avenue, with its well-defined geometric forms, Charles Millard Pratt’s house, next door to the Caroline Pratt House, rather reminds this amateur architecture fan of early F.L. Wright, though it was designed in 1893 by William Tubby. It serves as the residence of the Bishop of Brooklyn.

St. Joseph’s College, 245 Clinton Avenue, occupies several buildings in Clinton Hill in various architectural styles much like its nearby neighbor Pratt Institute, some of them landmarked. It was founded as the St. Joseph College for Women in 1916 and first occupied a building at 286 Washington Avenue and moved to its present address in 1918. Male students were first admitted in 1970 (a year after my alma mater, St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, first admitted women). St. Joseph’s opened a campus in Patchogue on Long Island in 1979. 

The Gothic Revival #284 Clinton Avenue was constructed in 1854 for “fancy goods” dealer William Crane. It has retained most of its detailing especially the extraordinary porch and entry pediment. Though there is a corner building now, a lawn on the south side once extended to DeKalb Avenue.

A tribute to Clinton Hill is that the building across the street, #275 Clinton, the apartment complex called simply “The Clinton,” couldn’t be more different. It was designed in 1897 by developer Clifford Betts and replaced a large mansion belonging to a watch case manufacturer, Joseph Fahys. Neeedless to say I noticed the standalone lamps at the front entrance.

Speaking of lamps there is a Type F next door at #269 Clinton. It works! I explain on this FNY page.

I headed west on DeKalb Avenue to ckeck out teh sidewalk signs, which always seem to be interesting in gentrified areas. Brooklyn Sporting Goods is just what you expect; its awning sign is in Garamond, always a good choice. Roman’s, an Italian restaurant, has stuck with its silver and black signage for over a decade. There is no wabbit on the menu at Fat Rabbit Diner, which will displease Elmer Fudd.

Clinton Hill is several blocks west of Nostrand Avenue; probably, this is a branch of the original. It has an interesting sign with cut out lettering.

Bittersweet is a coffee shop with a strict no pets policy.

The 74-story, 1,066-foot Brooklyn Tower, Brooklyn’s tallest, balefully overlooks tthe west end of DeKalb Avenue like Tolkein’s Eye of Sauron. DeKalb is one of Brooklyn’s lengthiest avenues, beginning at Fulton Street and the same Dime Savings Bank that the tower soars over and runs east and northeast to Linden Hill Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens. In Brooklyn, the “L” in DeKalb is pronounced; in Georgia’s DeKalb County, it isn’t. There seems to be genuine disagreement on what syllable to emphasize.

East-west avenues in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill are named for Revolutionary War generals (on our side). Baron Johan DeKalb (1721-1780) from Germany via France, joined the Marquis de Lafayette in fighting for and with George Washington, with whom he wintered at Valley Forge. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Camden, SC. Lafayette traveled to Camden in 1825 to lay the cornerstone of his monument there. DeKalb was not of noble birth and named himself a baron; his heroics later justified his hubris, somewhat. The Bronx also has a DeKalb Avenue in the Woodlawn Cemetery area.

The Fort Greene Historic District is one of Brooklyn’s oldest (1978). The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it before filmmaker Spike Lee arrived and it remains so after he left, decrying its gentrification. I seem to remember reading long ago…perhaps in the long-defunct Brooklyn Magazine in the 1990s… that South Oxford Street was Brooklyn’s best. It’s certainly a handsome block between DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues, with a nearly unbroken line of brownstones and tree shading.

The New School Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, #102-108 Lafayette at South Oxford, was established in 1857, after a schism with Old School Presbytery (since I’m not a church scholar, I won’t get into this in great detail) and a magnificent Romanesque Revival church designed by Grimshaw and Morrill followed in 1862 with final additions in 1917 …

…with Tiffany stained glass windows installed in 1897.

The Griffin Apartments, NW corner of Lafayette and Oxford, has several terra cotta representations of the mythical creature, which combines aspects of lions and birds of prey.

The Roanoke Apartments, #69-71 South Oxford Avenue, was built in 1891 from a design by prolific Brooklyn architect Montrose Morris.

Staggering from the unrelenting climate-altered humidity, it was time for me to escape to an air conditioned C train, but not before waiting 8 minutes in brutal underground constions. IND stations are time capsules of the years they were built, in Lafayette Avenue’s case, 1936. That year, the station was lit with incandescent bulbs and the train you waited for was not air-conditioned.

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7/28/24